Please participate in the poll. Question is whether we should migrate control, maintenance, community operations etc to Nivenly (Hackyderm) foundation.
Well, it is hard to answer this. It just raises questions:
- Who is hosting/admining this right now? One of the r/rust mods? Or someone else?
- What would happen if this organisation went bad/went under? Would anyone be able to take back control?
- What would happen if the current hoster/admin went AWOL/hit by a bus/etc? Is there anyone else (preferably in a separate country) with enough access to take over and sort things out?
- What would be gained from this? E.g. do they provide any specific services to the community?
I agree, many questions to answer (which is why I made the post :)).
Here we go:
Who is hosting/admining this right now? One of the r/rust mods? Or someone else?
Me, just a regular engineer, not a r/rust mod. I’m hosting this because:
- I like self-hosting and wanted to participate in the fediverse
- I write Rust professionally and very much enjoy the community around it but the recent Reddit fiasco made me realize that I need to do something about it
What would happen if this organisation went bad/went under? Would anyone be able to take back control?
By “this” you mean Nivenly? Yeah I don’t know about that. I think it’s best to have redundancy if we are to migrate entirely away from Reddit, presumably Nivenly takes care of that? Once I/others get in touch with them, we can answer this better.
What would happen if the current hoster/admin went AWOL/hit by a bus/etc? Is there anyone else (preferably in a separate country) with enough access to take over and sort things out?
So yeah, if I get hit by a bus, this instance will likely be dead as it stands right now. I’m working on potential mod/admin applications and will post something in the next couple days on some sort of streamlined public process so a few folks (other than myself and ideally in different time zones) can maintain the instance in my absence.
What would be gained from this? E.g. do they provide any specific services to the community?
Presumably:
- Transparency
- Governance
- Maintenance and uptime
- Server Costs(?)
- More outreach?
That was a pretty good answer. It is still difficult to make a choice from that. And presumably we would still need mods etc to actually handle things, build community etc. Having a good non-profit behind this seems beneficial though, but we need to have an escape hatch should things go south. Rebuilding a community again every few years is not productive.
That said, since you do not (from my understanding) have a background in running and moderating a community, it might be… interesting to see what happens when the first big controversy happens. (Not if, something is going to happen eventually. Either external causing heated discussions, like recently with the pulled talk. Or something internal, like a disagreement that leads to heated words. That is just human life.) You might want to have some mod(s) with experience at that point. And it is going to be the moment that decides if this community floats or sinks.
(I’m NOT volunteering btw, I absolutely do not have time or energy, nor the inclination to mod. Been there and done that back in the day on an IRC network, wasn’t for me.)
Hey. I’m the one who sent the DM, following up from this initiative: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/building-a-better-r-rust-together/95194
I’m not an active member of the Hachyderm/Nivenly org, but I condone their approach. It’s common knowledge by now that Rust’s biggest challenge of late has not been technical, but rather social and organizational. It is a consistently underappreciated aspect of open source practice. The most important part of Hachyderm’s existing infrastructure is their social architecture.
Like @admin@lemmyrs.org has said, this site will inevitably be a multi-person effort to maintain. Partnering up with an established org is a good way to help with that scaling challenge during the rather time-critical moment we’re in.
Hachyderm was considering starting their own Lemmy instance, which is why I suggested they should partner up with existing projects like lemmyrs instead, so we can avoid further fragmentation during these early days.
Do you know what Hachyderm’s opinion of Lemmy is, or is it too early?
@admin@lemmyrs.org can you give us a little insight to your thought process. What brought you to asking this question?
This was brought up in my DM. I thought rather than continue to discuss this in DMs it’s probably best to gather public opinion, that’s pretty much it.
Personally I’m neither for/against this and would prefer to leave it to community vote. But from the limited search I’ve done so far on Nivenly, Hackyderm; they do seem promising. Eventually it’s up to the community to decide, I’m only facilitating the discussion while things are in flux.
I had a lot of questions, many of which have been answered already.
Have they proposed this or suggested it, or is this an idea on your part? Are they in the habit of doing things like this? From what I read, they kinda ended up where they were by accident as things with twitter unfolded.
Nice, would you be so kind and share the answers to these questions with us? Cheers!
My answered questions are just those that others had asked already. I’m still a bit confused about the whole thing to be honest.
me too.
IMHO you should not just “hand over” the instance. If it were my instance, I would invite them to create accounts, be active, if everything works out they will become mods and maybe down the line admins, etc.
Err, agreed. Bad phrasing on my part. I do like the idea of inviting them to be here and participate in discussions.
There would certainly be public discussions and participation from other mod(s)/admin(s)/interested parties before any such decision is made.
